Low expectations for Cluj in the Champions League

Meanwhile if you want to read something a bit more substantial about CFR Cluj and their players and tactics, the very excellent Radu Baicu of Scouting Romania (scoutingromania.com/) has written this www.stretford-end.com/2012/10/an-introdu...cout-and-journalist/

Surprisingly spiteful edge about United in this article. And I'm not sure what Michael Carrick has done to earn such disdain. He's not travelled anyway, so I hope the Romanian public will be able to suppress their disappointment.

Ah the perils of trying to be funny on the internet. (Especially around Man Utd fans?)

The "surprisingly spiteful edge" must solely be contained in the phrase "last year’s second-best team in Manchester" since I can find nothing else is what I wrote that would qualify. Bit oversensitive no?

And the dig at Carrick. But, yeah, probably.

United should still just about scrape a win tonight, but the struggle to cobble together a four-man midfield seems worrying - looking at Nani, Cleverly, Kagawa and Fletcher, with Powell the only option on the bench.

Struck a chord with me this article. Just like two years ago when my adopted hometown club Zilina played Chelsea. 2,500-odd die-hards pay 5-7 Euros here to watch Trnava, Nitra and the rest in Corgon Liga games.

For Terry and chums, there were people tripping over themselves to fork out 150 Euros. Half of these 'locals' put on their nice blue scarves for the occasion. Those of us in the home sections who knew a bit about the Zilina players were outnumbered about 2 to 1.

Bloody awful night, especially when Chelsea went 3-0 up after 30 mins. Hope Andy enjoys tonight's game a bit more...

Wow, a surprising lack of insight here.

First of all, Romanian football has been an ego contest between middle-aged, fat and shouty men for far longer than I can remember, for the last 40 years or so definitely.

Secondly, the fact that Árpád Pászkány bought a club from Cluj isn't irrelevant at all, as him being an ethnic Hungarian and given his existing ties to the city of Cluj, he was always going to buy a Cluj team. That he didn't end up buying his first choice, the traditionally bigger club U Cluj, was mostly down to his ethnicity too: U Cluj's leaders feared they were going to be turned into a "Hungarian" club and thus ostracised from Romanian football.

Of course it's more cool to just dismiss the whole story with a couple of stale wisecracks, on the other hand the truth is far more interesting.

Well, that story has been told in the magazine before. www.wsc.co.uk/the-archive/18-Letter-from.../4570-romania I could have just repeated all that, slightly updated I suppose.

(But what's really interesting in Cluj football this year is the mess at "U", and that would be a story worth hearing. Feel like doing the honours biziclop?)

I know it's already been told, a link to it would've been nice though to provide some background to the story. Anyway, as I don't live in Transylvania any more, I'm not in the loop as to the day to day events in Romania but feel free to ask me anything about Hungarian football.

As posted elsewhere, but relevant to this story, CFR's surprisingly good European showing has not saved Ioan Andone's job, and as far as I can tell from twitter, he's being replaced today by Edy Reja (formerly of Napoli and Lazio, and seemingly a manager way above the usual calibre of coaches in the Romanian league)